White Dots Trailing Japan's Sky Captured in Photo Are Actually Space X's Over 2,900 Starlink Satellites in Space

On September 5, Daichi Fujii, a curator at the Hiratsuka City Museum in Hiratsuka, Japan, posted a video of what appeared to be dozens of white dots drifting across the sky. The dots are actually a group of Starlink satellites made by SpaceX.

Starlink Creates Trail of Dots in the Sky

Fujii told Newsweek that he used a high-sensitivity digital camera mounted on a tripod to record the film from his Hiratsuka house. The tripod was then manually shifted gradually in the direction of the satellites. In a translated statement in Newsweek, Fujii said that he had seen a Starlink satellite pass overhead before. He said that he had seen that before a lot of times.

The museum curator previously shared another clear footage showing a trail of Starlink satellites passing overhead in November 2019. This time, the camera was locked in place.

Fuji posted shared the photo on his Twitter account.

Since SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites in May 2019, the sight has become more frequent over time. The small satellites were sent into orbit at the time in batches of 60. On August 28, 54 of them were put into service, then 46 on August 31, and finally 51 on September 5.

Starlink Satellites in the Sky

According to Jonathan McDowell's webpage, 3,259 Starlink satellites had been launched as of September 8 in total. Because some of them have fallen out of orbit since the beginning of the Starlink program, 2,991 of them remains circling the Earth.

The goal of Starlink is to make satellite internet service dependable and available to paying consumers all over the world. This technology has traditionally been utilized only by those who live in rural locations without access to other types of internet access, such as cable or fiber.

There are worries that the numerous Starlink satellites in orbit, some of which can be seen from the ground, could obstruct astronomers' or amateur observers' ability to see the night sky clearly.

To combat this, SpaceX has taken measures like altering the outside material of the satellites to reflect sunlight in a variety of angles. Additionally, it created sun visors to help in preventing sunlight from ever reaching the satellites.

Starlink Project

The satellite internet service technology that Starlink uses has been used for decades. It is a satellite system that sends radio signals over the void of space to transfer internet data instead of using cable technology like fiber optics. Starlink users on Earth receive data from satellites in space after receiving signals from ground stations. Each Starlink satellite has a flat body and a weight of 573 pounds. The Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX has room for up to 60 satellites.

According to TechTarget, Starlink aims to build a low latency space network that supports edge computing on Earth. In particular, while low latency is a key need, building a global network in space is not an easy task. To meet this demand, SpaceX has proposed a constellation of nearly 42,000 tablet-sized satellites in low orbit. Tight network coverage is produced by the CubeSats, small satellites that are frequently utilized in LEO, and low latency is produced by their low Earth orbit.

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